Language and metaphysics

Abstract

Problems connected with these conceptions of mathematics are discussed in

Social Criticism, Moral Reasoning and the Literary Form

“…Before discussing Crary's conception, it should be noted that the notion of form is particularly tricky when used in a generalising way because it does not mark only one kind of distinction: there are wide and narrow conceptions depending on what they include and leave out. In philosophy, the notion of form as logical form has been used prescriptively with regard to practices of human reasoning which have been found ultimately underpinned by and, for that reason, inferior to particular ways of speaking tied to formal logical calculi (Stenlund 1996 and. There is a danger of retaining this orientation, for example, when speaking of the form of moral reasoning -not only in the temptation to hold up some standard that is appealing to the philosophical imagination, but also in tying reasoning to particular linguistic or textual features, as part of the idea that there are some such general features which can help us identify, in a context-independent way, when we are dealing with a case of moral reasoning.…”

“…It seems that the Wittgenstein that Crary has taken to Frankfurt had a revelation along the way and, like Saul on the road to Damascus, from persecutor became a disciple of metaphysics, taking for granted the well-formedness of metaphysical questions on objective reality and subscribing to the attending rigid vocabulary that is indispensible in their posing (Stenlund 1996). Crary not only takes Winch and Wittgenstein as postulators of an alternative ontology, rather than as withdrawing their own stakes when it comes to what philosophers understand as ontology (Tsilipakos 2015) but she also throws in her lot in handling expressions such as 'objective', 'how things really are', 'the world', 'reality' and 'rationality', not by embedding them in the stream of practical life and seeing what they actually amount to, but rather by referring them to philosophical pictures, such as that of world and mind, or the offered alternative, improved but no less metaphysical, which conceives reality as constitutively ethical.…”

Theoretical Procedures and Elder-Vass’s Critical Realist Ontology

“…Even if, nevertheless, there were no incoherence between the definition of the emergentist ontological scheme and the scientific examples that serve to illustrate it, the latter would still not be able to do the work that they are recruited to perform. In Sören Stenlund’s (1996) polemical words, “the function of the simple and “intuitively appealing” examples given to illustrate a certain scheme is not constitutive evidence and support for the correctness and the general validity of the scheme, which is what philosophers want us to believe” (206). For what these examples, which can serve as constitutive of what Stenlund calls “the grammatical scheme,” do not (and could not) do is settle the range of application of the scheme.…”

“…operating on simplified grammatical schemes in (i) hardening a situated use of a concept into the picture providing us with its metaphysical grammar (e.g., the picture of what it is for language to refer picks one of the possible employments of “refer” and turns it into a theoretical explanation of all other uses; cf. Stenlund 1996) and (ii) stipulatively employing a set of categories to reorganize our concepts (the history of philosophy is, of course, replete with such schemes). 5…”